from the wow dept

Three years ago, down in Australia, the Australian Law Reform Commission started examining various copyright reform proposals, and eventually made a rather mild suggestion: bring fair use to Australia. Frankly, we felt that the Commission could have gone much further, but it basically said to copy the American approach to fair use. Not surprisingly, Hollywood flipped out, claiming that it would "lead to an increase in piracy." And, soon after that, the new government, led by Attorney General George Brandis flat out ignored the report and pushed for expanding copyright against the public interest, and very much towards exactly what Hollywood wanted. This wasn't all that surprising, given that it was revealed that Hollywood representatives spent a lot of time with Brandis, while he deliberately avoided meeting with representatives of the public.

But, in a bit of a surprise, last week, a different Australian government commission, the Productivity Commission, released one of the most amazing reports on copyright that you'll see out of a government body. The Productivity Commission is a government agency designed to give independent advice to the government -- and had been tasked with exploring how well Australia's intellectual property laws were working.

In short, the answer provided by the commission is: not well.

Just take a look at the infographic the Commission pushed out along with the report, which is titled "Copy(not)right."

The whole section on the problems of copyright as currently in place in Australia is worth reading. They don't pull many punches:

Australia’s copyright arrangements are weighed too heavily in favour of copyright owners, to the detriment of the long-term interests of both consumers and intermediate users. Unlike other IP rights, copyright makes no attempt to target those works where ‘free riding’ by users would undermine the incentives to create. Instead, copyright is overly broad; provides the same levels of protection to commercial and non-commercial works; and protects works with very low levels of creative input, works that are no longer being supplied to the market, and works where ownership can no longer be identified.

Like the report from three years ago, this report strongly supports fair use (citing that report in part), and their proposal in that area is really strong too. For years now, here at Techdirt, we've argued against calling fair use a "limitation and exception" to copyright, because that's misleading. Fair use is about the public's rights. And it appears that the Commission agrees, titling its section on fair use: "A new system of user rights."

In that section, the Commission notes that fair use is important in making sure that copyright law only is used to "target those works where 'free riding' by users would undermine the economic incentives to create and disseminate works." This should make intuitive sense to basically everyone. Copyright is much more defensible if it's only used in cases where infringement is undermining the incentives to create. But where that's not happening, then claiming infringement seems inappropriate.

The report then supports the basic four-factor test as used in the US. It also points out that the main complaint against this approach by legacy copyright industry players -- that because there's no case law, it would lead to a big litigation mess -- was unfounded and suggests a workaround to make the transition easier:

In the Commission’s view, legal uncertainty is not a compelling reason to eschew a fair use exception in Australia, nor is legal certainty desirable in and of itself. Courts interpret the application of legislative principles to new cases all the time, updating case law when the circumstances warrant doing so.

To reduce uncertainty, the Commission is recommending Australia’s fair use exception contain a non-exhaustive list of illustrative uses, which provides strong guidance to rights holders and users. Existing Australian and foreign case law, particularly from the United States where fair use has operated for some time, will provide further guidance on what constitutes fair use.

Later in the more detailed part of the report, the Commission is even more direct in refuting (in great detail) each and every objection by the legacy copyright industries. In fact, they have a whole callout box that picks apart the ridiculous claims by various legacy copyright players on the "costs" of fair use:

It also notes that the fair use recommendation from three years ago should be the starting point for reform, representing the "minimum level of change" and suggesting Australia go much further, specifically in exempting orphan works and "out-of-commerce" works.

Yes, you read that right, the Commission is suggesting a "use it or lose it" feature for copyright:

The lack of any requirement for rights holders to actively supply the Australian market reduces the efficiency of Australia’s copyright regime. Demand for works that have been created, but are not being supplied, reduces consumer welfare and the profits of intermediaries and original rights holders. Where a rights holder has made a choice not to supply their works to the market (or refuses to supply a market), granting consumers access to that work, such as through a fair use exception, improves consumer wellbeing without reducing incentives to create copyright works. By definition, if a work is not being supplied to the market, concerns about copying and ‘free riding’ are moot.

While this will undoubtedly be shocking to many in the copyright space -- the report points out that such features are common in other areas of intellectual property law.

From there, the report points out how ridiculous geoblocking is, and says that getting around those blocks should not be seen as infringement:

The use of geoblocking technology is pervasive, and frequently results in Australian consumers being offered a lower level of digital service (such as a more limited music or TV streaming catalogue) at a higher price than in overseas markets. Studies show Australian consumers systematically pay higher prices for professional software, music, games and e-books than consumers in comparable overseas markets. While some digital savvy consumers are able to avoid these costs (such as through the use of proxy servers and virtual private networks), many are relegated to paying inflated prices for lower standard services.

The Australian Government should make clear that it is not an infringement of Australia’s copyright system for consumers to circumvent geoblocking technology and should seek to avoid international obligations that would preclude such practices.

Also, not surprisingly, the report finds that copyright terms are ridiculously long and that harms the public massively:

The evidence (and indeed logic) suggests that the duration of copyright protection is far more than is needed. Few, if any, creators are motivated by the promise of financial returns long after death, particularly when the commercial life of most works is less than 5 years.

Overly long copyright terms impose costs on the community. Empirical work focussing on Australia’s extension of copyright protection from life plus 50 years to life plus 70 years (a requirement introduced as part of the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement) estimated that an additional 20 years protection would result in net transfers from Australian consumers to foreign rights holders of around $88 million per year. But these are likely to be a fraction of the full costs of excessive copyright protection. The retrospective application of term extension exacerbates the cost to the community, providing windfall gains to copyright holders with no corresponding benefit.

The report even suggests that a copyright term of maybe 25 years seems a lot more appropriate, based on actual empirical studies (what a concept: not basic copyright policy entirely on faith).

The report also states what many of us have argued for years, but which seems like something that rarely comes up in "respectable" conversations around copyright: if the copyright is being used outside the "incentive to create," then it makes no sense:

Unlike other IP rights, copyright makes no attempt to target those works where ‘free riding’ by users would undermine the incentives to create. Instead, copyright is expansive and ‘all encompassing’, providing the same levels of protection to commercial and non-commercial works, to works with essentially no degree of creativity, to works that are no longer being supplied to the market, and to works where ownership can no longer be identified. This leads to copyright covering works that require no incentive for creation, and works that have exhausted their commercial life and are no longer available. Beneficial uses of such material are unrealised. Accordingly, the current Copyright Act is weighted too heavily in favour of copyright owners, to the detriment of the long-term interests of users.

Finally, the report notes that international trade agreements are doing a terrible job constraining Australia and blocking its ability to fix the many problems of copyright and to implement the sensible recommendations in the document. This is quite telling, since Australia was actually one of the voices in the TPP negotiations pushing for expanded copyright. This report is basically slapping those negotiators and pointing out that what they're doing runs directly counter to the public interest. After pointing out the state of these agreements, the report notes:

a consequence of embodying so much of our IP provisions in international agreements is that Australia is significantly constrained in reforming its IP arrangements

The report also notes that greater enforcement against individuals for file sharing or intermediaries for providing tools has "only had a modest impact," and that the real way to decrease piracy is not to ratchet up the law, but to make more legal content available:

Changes to the law to encourage Internet service providers to cooperate with rights holders, as well as litigation, have only had a modest impact in reducing infringement. Further legislative change is unlikely to improve compliance with the law.

Instead, evidence suggests infringement declines with better content availability and most consumers prefer paid, legal consumption. As such, an effective approach to reducing infringement is the timely release of content to Australian consumers. This requires action by rights holders and their intermediaries.

Honestly, this is the most thorough and amazing document on copyright I've ever seen come out of a government body (we'll address its coverage of patents in another post...). It's level headed and reasonable and actually hits on most of the key "big issues." I'm guessing that it's so right on and so detailed... that it will be (1) attacked viciously by legacy players and (2) ignored by lawmakers when it comes time to actually reform the system. Oh, and while the report is technically under copyright (Australia has crown copyright, which allows government works to be under copyright), the authors wisely have slapped a CC-BY license on it, meaning that we can share it here as well.

from the set-up-to-fail dept

Discussions about copyright reform in Australia are now entering their fourth year, and the longer they go on, the worse the proposals become. That's in part because there has been a change of government in the interim, and the present Attorney-General, George Brandis, has made it clear he's firmly on the side of copyright companies, and indifferent to the Australian public's concerns or needs in a digital world.

One big problem for him and his maximalist friends is that a key recommendation of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), in its extremely detailed and rigorous analysis of the state of copyright in Australia, was to introduce a new fair use provision. This is absolute anathema for the copyright companies, which seem to hold that the law should only ever be changed in their favor, imposing a kind of copyright ratchet that prevents the public from gaining any substantial new rights. Simply dropping the fair use idea would be too obvious, so a way needs to be found to kill it off without causing an outcry against the Australian government's blatant favoritism. As ZDNet reports, maybe Brandis has found what he is looking for:

The Australian Attorney-General's Department has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis into the recommendation by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) to implement a fair use provision in the amendments that the government is proposing to make to the Copyright Act in order to adapt to the digital world.

The economic analysis, announced on Wednesday, will examine the cost effects that fair use would impose on copyright holders along with copyright user groups.

Although that sounds perfectly reasonable, the ZDNet story adds some important historical context from a year ago that Brandis probably hoped nobody would remember:

Brandis again affirmed his partiality toward content owners, claiming that the recommendation to implement a fair use defence was "a controversial proposal" and would weaken the rights of copyright owners.

"In considering the recommendations, we will be particularly concerned to ensure and we will approach the consideration of the report with the view that no prejudice be caused to the interests of rights holders and creators," he said in February 2014.

Since by its very nature fair use allows the public to use copyright material in various ways without needing to pay a licensing fee, this means there will inevitably be some "prejudice" to the copyright companies, although minor in comparison to the major gains for eveyone else. However impartial and balanced the cost-benefit analysis will be, it is bound to expose the fact that if the public gains any new freedoms there will be a theoretical loss for the copyright holders.

And that, presumably, will allow Brandis to refuse to implement the ALRC recommendation on the grounds that he must defend the interests of creators, even though they would be among the greatest benefactors of a fair use provision, which would allow them to use existing works in new and exciting ways. But who cares about art when corporate profits are at stake?

from the politics-in-action dept

We kind of expected this to happen, but after a long process in which the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) carefully reviewed all sorts of proposals and evidence on copyright reform, and released some sensible proposals, Australia's Attorney General (who is also its Arts Minister apparently), George Brandis, has ignored all of it, preferring to only listen to a Hollywood front group, leading him to push for a three strikes plan and censorship in an attempt to "protect" Hollywood. He does this, even though some of the best research on how terribly ineffective three strikes programs have been comes from Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin.

In other words, despite lots of careful research by independent parties, and plenty of scholarly work to inform the debate, Brandis has decided to ignore all of it, and go with what the MPAA is telling him to do -- and yes, the "Australian Screen Association" is actually run by folks in Hollywood (though it changed its name from AFACT to ASA to try to hide that).

For years, our biggest complaint with copyright policies is the fact that so much of it is entirely faith-based. The movie and recording industries go on big emotional pleas about how "piracy" is destroying their industries (despite record output), and insist that the reason is piracy -- ignoring tons of evidence that this is not the case. There is no doubt that these industries are facing serious transitions, but time and time again, we've seen that those who embrace the transition and (here's the key part) provide more of what the public wants in a convenient fashion tend to do better than they did before. At the same time, merely ratcheting up enforcement and censorship creates massive unintended consequences and little actual benefit for the industries who push for those policies.

Australia's decision to cave to Hollywood on this will be cheered as a victory by the MPAA and its various supporters, but it's a massive loss for everyone. Promoting censorship along with anti-innovation and anti-consumer policies are no way to embrace the future.

from the because-of-course-they-are dept

For years, we followed the important iiNet case in Australia. Hollywood studios, which ran a group called AFACT in Australia, wanted to "set an example" of why ISPs should be liable for copyright infringement done on their networks, and deliberately chose iiNet to sue, believing the ISP was too small to mount a serious challenge. Instead, iiNet fought back strongly, making really strong points about how ridiculous it was to pin the blame on an ISP. The result was a complete victory for iiNet. It won at the district court, at the appeals court and finally at Australia's high court.

Of course, Hollywood (AFACT is Australian-in-name-only -- a Wikileaks State Department cable revealed it to be an operation wholly controlled by the MPAA in Hollywood) continued to freak out, leading the Australian government to hold "stakeholder" meetings between the entertainment industry and the ISPs (note: no public representatives, even though they're the real stakeholders), to try to broker an agreement to make ISPs act as copyright cops. Of course, because Hollywood's position is inherently ridiculous, the ISPs noted that it was like negotiating with a brick wall, and talks soon broke down. The ISPs made it clear that it was silly to blame them when Hollywood itself was to blame by not making works available.

Josh Taylor over at ZDnet used the Freedom of Information Act to get emails from between Neil Gane -- the "contractor" who ran AFACT and now the Australian Screen Association -- and Brandis, showing an ongoing campaign in which Gane continued to push Brandis with a series of one-sided misleading emails about how anti-consumer programs in other countries were the way forward:

In nine emails from Gane to the Attorney-General's department secretary, Roger Wilkins, and first assistant secretary in the civil law division, Matt Minogue, sent between the election and this year, obtained by ZDNet under Freedom of Information, Gane appears to be providing education notices of his own to the department, offering insights into how copyright infringement is being dealt with in other countries.

In one email pointing out Canada's moves, he notes that the Canadian government was not buying into the notion that ISPs should be compensated for having to warn customers for downloading infringing content.

There are a number of other emails, including a few that regular Techdirt readers may find especially amusing, including one mocking the "vocal minority" who were complaining that draconian copyright enforcement on things like Game of Thrones downloading might have serious unintended consequences. Update: The "vocal minority" has responded.

Meanwhile, Brandis -- who has also been vehemently defending the NSA -- recently took a trip to the US, in part to explore issues around copyright. Did he meet with copyright scholars or other experts on these issues? Nope. Instead, he met with the director of the Center for Copyright Information, who runs the US's "six strikes" program. Brandis seems to have made up his mind, after being pushed on it by the MPAA, and with no respect at all to facts or reality.

All in all, Brandis appears to be only listening to one exceptionally biased party, even as a very long and thorough review process by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) found that fair use was important, and that copyright reform needed to be modernized to pay attention to the important rights and uses of the public. But apparently, that all gets thrown out the window because a Hollywood spokesperson has a direct email line to the Attorney General.

from the good-move dept

Last year, we noted that Australia was beginning the process of copyright reform, and it appeared that the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) was asking the right kinds of questions. Among the major concerns that some commenters raised was the lack of fair use under Australian copyright law. When a similar process took place in the UK, it was decided not to try to add fair use to UK law. The entertainment industry argued, ridiculously, that fair use would lead to too much litigation.

Thankfully, it appears that Australia is willing to go that extra step. There was apparently a meeting held yesterday by the Australian Law Reform Commission, in which they revealed some of the proposed reforms, which were to be officially released in a paper at the end of May. We've heard from some people who attended that the information revealed in the meeting was supposed to be kept secret, but it appears that the Australian Law Library Association jumped the gun with some thankfully revealing tweets.